Delicacy, nuance and value range awareness develop from putting in a good amount of time drawing. It really helps to find the eye of a mentor or teacher who can give valid objective critiques and possibly some training. When I’ve spent a lot of time on a piece I have an increase in awareness and interpretation that spills into my everyday life. The art pieces themselves become more interconnected, like an aesthetic ecology that develops and allows all sorts of subtle nuances. When the art is at that stage – we’re talking dozens to hundreds of hours of me marinating a piece with my pencils and brushes – those interconnections begin to spontaneously generate in the world around me. They visually well up automatically until it often seems I’m in the middle of a network all around me that flows effortlessly everywhere, in everything.
A personally specific non-art example of such a developed awareness – when younger I spent days and weeks and months landscaping, raking topsoil before the sod went down. I could see all the little bumps and dips in the soil and smooth them out with ease. The next landscaping season it would take several days for my hand and eye to reacquire that acuity and have the rake automatically get it right. You can see artists’ beginner pencil work generally has a rough clumsiness in their markings and tonal choices. It takes a lot of time before their pencil work performs smoothly and cleanly.
I recommend that for anyone worrying about their relative awareness of creative nuances such as tone and value range, or textures and balances, is to relax and let your eye find its own innate range of awareness. If you don’t reach a level you believed artwork needed to be at, then revisit your ideas about art and adjust your personal creative choices accordingly. That is part of what fuels a person’s personal stylistic development. Artists will gravitate towards what best works for their physical hand and eye.